[KLUG Members] Suse questions

[Bert Obbink]

We use SuSE for a number of years now. I started in 1998 with a Caldera 
(Linux Light) version. It was our first mail system, used on a dial up 
line. Each hour it phoned out to get the mail from the provider. Later 
we migrated to some Redhat version. Which I found difficult to manage. 
We did not use it for long. We moved to SuSe 6.1. Later we bought a SuSE 
6.3 version. Basically because we learned that the ISDN support should 
be much better than from other distro's. We still use 6.3 but will move 
to 7.3 very soon know, (came in last week).  I find SuSE a very good 
disto, there web-site is very up-to-date (don't know about others). And 
I love KDE. GNOME is comming with SuSE too, but I never came to try it. 
I know some of you are really GNOME lovers so there might be a risc here 
:-) ...

I have SuSE 7.1 running at my work stations at work, at my pc at home 
and on my laptop, an Tulip Vision Line. I had NEVER and I must stretch 
NEVER had any problem with installing any RPM. As far as I know SuSE is 
complely RPM based. I installed many RedHat based rpm's without a 
problem. SuSE could very well be placing some things in different places 
than RedHat does, but if it does, it's been done without giving problems.

The only program I had a problem to install is Quake2. It took a long 
time before it ran; although this could be caused by the fact I only 
have a M$ version and needed some stuff from the internet before it ran...
Jbuilder 5 is still crashing, so I stoped using it, and went to use 
javac, which is great. The appletviewer is also very fine. There must be 
more java tools but for me javac is just doing fine.

I tried to get vmware on the road, never succeded. It gave some serious 
problems on my laptop. It never recognized any floppy and/or cd drive. 
Never tried it on other hardware.

Its a fact you never use all the cd's, but installing from the dvd is 
really great. Never change a disk. There must be cd's I have never used, 
but they don't bother me too.

I tried to install xemian evolution on SuSE but needed so many lib's I 
gave up. But this is most likely a GNOME versus KDE problem. And because 
I like what I am reading about evolution I even might try GNOME some 
time. Although I would like a KDE version even more.

Basically I think it doesn't matter much which disto you use as long you 
are happy with it. Personally I think that Redhat will be the most 
important distro for the United States and SuSE will be the one for 
Europe. The German and French  government are really pushing open source 
and some large software companies are involved. You might know that M$ 
is out at the German Government, too many backdoors/bugs/security-riscs 
? they can't control. So the are working hard to replace all kind of 
sofware by open source versions.

you might want to take a look at: 
www.redhat.de  or  www.redhat.fr
www.linuxtag.org  (you find a nice logo here:  "understützt durch 
Bundesministerium fürWirtschaft und technologie", for the non German 
readers it means "supported by the department of Science and Technology 
of the German Goverment"
www.newsforge.com/article.pl?sid=01/10/05/1611215&mode=thread

Don't miss the last link, it has some interesting topics.


Bert.



Tony Gettig wrote:

>Hi folks,
>
>First let me say that I am not trying to start a Suse vs Red Hat war. I
>am just hoping to get a better idea of what to expect should I delve
>into Suse.
>
>The age old argument of whether size matters or not is evident when you
>consider the packaging of Suse. I mean, 6 CD's and a DVD (in
>Professional Edition)? That's a lot of stuff! More stuff can be
>confusing though. I am specifically wondering about the VMware that
>comes with Suse Pro. Is it a full version or a demo? Does anyone know
>for sure? 
>
>On configuration and administration, I understand Suse keeps some files
>in different directories than Red Hat and other RPM based distros. What
>are the differences? My initial thought is that this departure from a
>loose defacto standard of file placement would not be good. But is it? 
>
>It also seems that Suse has better support for newer hardware, but I
>suppose that could be relative to the individual. My newest hardware is
>a PII-600. :) (Before that it was a 233 MMX!)
>
>I read a review recently that I thought was fair and balanced of the
>best distro for a workstation and the best distro for a server. Suse won
>both. It is in the November 26, 2001 issue of Network Computing. The
>online version can be seen at
>
>http://www.networkcomputing.com/1224/1224f2.html
>
>Tony
>
>
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